Category: Behind the Scenes

In our ceaseless quest to save you more time, we just added a new feature that lets you download multiple timelines at once.

As you know, Timeline Genius automatically creates tailored timelines for your vendors, venues, and wedding party, which you can download in PDF or Word format. With our new feature, you don’t have to download these tailored timelines one by one. You can instantly download as many as you want and get them in a zip file.

As part of this new feature, we also improved the filenames for your timeline downloads by making them more descriptive.

To see the new feature in action, just check out the video below.

As with every other feature we’ve developed, this new multi-timeline download feature is designed to save you time and to make it easier for you to keep creating awesome timelines.

We’ve got lots of other powerful new features coming soon, so stay tuned!

At Timeline Genius, we decided to take a unique approach to our Instagram page. Instead of just posting photos of various events or of our software, we decided to fill our whole profile page with quotes about two things: inspiration and love.

INSPIRATION

Inspiration is one of our focuses because we’re deeply inspired by you (the planners we work with), and we hope to inspire you in return. I’ve been a full-time entrepreneur since 2005, and I know the courage it takes to build your own company and to follow your dreams. Every week I have the privilege of speaking with extraordinary wedding planners around the United States and abroad, and you constantly inspire me.

Some of you have already built thriving, long-standing planning companies. And some of you are in the early stages of building your companies. But you all share a determination to succeed and a passion for your work, which is awesome.

On our Instagram page, we want to post quotes that will give you a boost and lift your spirits as you continue on your journey. For example, the above quote that I copied from our Instagram page is one of my personal favorites from Dr. Martin Luther King.

When you’re starting a company, or almost any long, meaningful journey, it can take courage and faith to take the first step… because there’s nobody there to tell you exactly how it’s going to play out. You have to trust yourself and keep the fear of failure at bay. It’s always inspired me to hear those words from Dr. King — a man who led a movement that forever changed our country and the world for the better.

LOVE

The second topic we focus on with our Instagram page is love. Why? Because love is everything and because it’s certainly the very core and bedrock of our whole industry.

Once you strip away all the logistics, financial exchanges, contracts, and other fleetingly consequential facets of the wedding industry, what you’re left with is the real reason why the industry exists in the first place — to celebrate love.

I still remember what I felt like when I was exchanging vows with my wife in front of every person I loved in the world… It was a transcendental experience… This invisible, yet palpable energy, was filling the whole room, like a deeply soothing, radiant light. All of our family and friends felt it… And I’ve felt it when I’ve attended the weddings of my friends. It gets me every time because it’s magical…

We celebrate love on our Instagram page because all of our work, and our industry as a whole, is aimed at celebrating love.

We love to see your inspiring work and learn about our awesome users, so we wanted to issue an official call for submissions. In case you haven’t seen, we love to feature our users. You’d be in the excellent company of planners like Tickled Events, Bridal Bliss, and STX Weddings.

photo credit: ykvision

Check out our Submissions page to see different ways you can be featured. Have wisdom to share? An office space to show off? A wedding, or even just one breathtaking image you can’t keep to yourself?

We can barely contain our excitement – we have a new Timeline Genius feature that is FREE for everyone to use, one and all! Allow us to introduce, the Timeline Genius Mobile Rolodex:

After receiving enthusiastic feedback from our user base, we’re answering the call to provide an easy way to store all of your event contacts. I’m a bit embarrassed to say, but as a wedding planner, my method for keeping track of contacts was to sit down a week before the wedding, go through all contracts and emails, and add every relevant party to my phone’s address book. As a result, my contact list is full of miscellaneous best men, maids of honor, caricature artists etc, and not in an organized fashion!

With TG’s Mobile Rolodex, you can now keep track of all of your vendors, venues, and clients in one, perfectly organized place.

If you already use Timeline Genius to create your timelines, all of the vendor contacts you’ve entered automatically appear in your mobile rolodex. Just go to timelinegenius.com/rolodex and log in!

If you’re new to Timeline Genius, simply create a login and start entering contacts. You’ll be able to log in anytime to have all of your wedding contacts at your fingertips. You can search for who you need to reach, and then with just a tap: call, text, email, or navigate to them!

We know that working in events is no easy task, so we’re on a mission to do everything we can to help. Consider this Mobile Rolodex our gift to you – we hope you enjoy!

Hello Timeline Geniuses!
Those of you who knew us before might have noticed that we had a makeover:

Tada! What do you think?

Like any startup, Timeline Genius had to make choices about where to invest its time and money. The main mission was to enable planners to create timelines easily. By doing this, we would be eliminating stressful and tedious aspects of the job, thus making work more enjoyable (yes please!).

We would also be creating more time for planners, which would allow them to thrive and take on more business. Our tool had to be robust and perfect. So for the first year and a half, that is where Timeline Genius put its resources: perfecting a tool that truly makes the lives of its users better.

For the past 2 and a half years, I’ve been working days, nights, and weekends on Timeline Genius. And I’ve been investing my own funds to build it. For my first blog post, I thought it would be appropriate to share why I love Timeline Genius and why I’m so committed to it.

But before I dig deeply into my own inner motives and passion, I just want to say that I have an amazing team in this venture. And without them, there would be no Timeline Genius. This fact should not be overlooked as I write about my inner workings here.

Ok, so back to the exercise of sharing the reasons for my commitment to Timeline Genius… I’ve given this a good deal of thought, and here goes my answer (in classic Eddie-enumerated-list style :D).

The best way for you to get to know us is to have you meet the mind behind Timeline Genius: Eddie Babbage.

It was Eddie’s passion and intelligence that drew our team together. I first met him when he reached out for feedback on the product in progress. As a wedding planner, I’ve talked to a number of tech entrepreneurs interested in breaking into weddings. All of them seemed excited by the potential dollars, but ultimately naive about the ins and outs of the industry.

Eddie was completely different. It wasn’t about the profit for him. I could tell by the questions he asked and the way he listened that he genuinely wanted to make my job easier. I could also tell that the man had done his homework! He knew everything about a wedding day schedule, from the complexity of a First Look, to how altering the timing of one event can have a domino effect.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was one of a few dozen planners he had talked to in depth to make Timeline Genius truly address the difficulties planners face. By now, he has consulted with well over 100 planners across the United States and Mexico. It is this enthusiastic approach that has shaped the Timeline Genius product into one that truly serves the needs of anyone creating a timeline for a complex event.

Eddie is not one to toot his own horn, so allow me to help, just a little! His impressive background includes degrees from Duke University and Harvard Law School, plus ten years as a tech entrepreneur. Timeline Genius is his third start-up, and started in 2013, when Eddie was looking to have his next undertaking solve a real problem. Whatever the product, he wanted it to provide value and make people’s lives better.

So how did we get so lucky that he turned his attention to events? We can thank Eddie’s beautiful wife Brooke for that! They tied the knot in December 2010.

Brooke did all of the planning herself, so she experienced firsthand the complexity that goes into a wedding day, including creating and updating a timeline. As Eddie was thinking about what his next project would be, Brooke handed him a lightbulb.

“Honey, why don’t you look into the wedding industry? It seems a lot of good could be done there.”

So Eddie set to work, calling dozens of planners to learn more about their pain points, and where the greatest improvement could be made. On August 28th, Eddie’s birthday, he was on a call with Master Bridal Consultant Brigid Horne-Nestor, when they got to talking about timelines. The lightbulb Brooke had given to Eddie was suddenly lit. What was the biggest time-sink for wedding planners? Timelines.

The more calls Eddie made, the more evident it became: everybody hated timelines! Even the pros who did them best did not enjoy wrestling with Excel and Word. In our high-tech world, events have been left behind. It became Eddie’s mission to help the event industry catch up.

Timeline Genius is now serving wedding planners across the country, but Eddie is not done with improvements. You can still find him on the phone every week, having conversations with real planners about how to make the product better and better for them. It is this tireless research and dedication that continues to inspire us here at Timeline Genius. We won’t be satisfied until an event planner’s workflow is as streamlined as can be. As Eddie always says, onward!

We’re so excited to start our blog, where we plan to engage with all of you, share tips about event planning, and give you a behind-the-scenes view of what we do and why we do it.

“But wait!” we hear some of you say, “What exactly is a timeline anyway, and why do I need a genius to help me with it?”

Anyone planning an event will create a timeline, though some prefer to use the terms “schedule” or “itinerary”. No matter what you call it, the timeline is the most crucial piece of any event.

A good timeline should contain all participating vendors plus their contact information, and stitch together every last detail of the day. Most of our users are wedding planners, so their timelines will include 8-12 vendors, and everything from hair and makeup setup in the morning, to tables and chairs pickup at the end of the night. A great timeline can also be broken down into customized versions for each vendor, so that each team involved can focus on the duties most pertinent to them.

If that’s you, fantastic! Most Timeline Genius users are professional wedding planners who can write timelines in their sleep. But even sleep-writing takes time 🙂

Timelines for complex events are not a one-and-done deal, and as a wedding planner myself, I can say they are quite a pain in the bum! It takes time to collect vendor contact information, to reach out to confirm details, to list out every component of a very long day, and to constantly update as changes are made and new information comes in.

A wedding day is full of moving pieces, and when the timing for one piece shifts, many other pieces have to be adjusted as well. Making customized schedules for each client and vendor takes time too. Our research shows planners spend an average of 10-15 hours on each timeline.

And that’s where our genius tool wants to help. Timeline Genius streamlines the process by asking a series of simple questions. Your answers allow our algorithm to generate a customized template that is 75% done. The planner just needs to fine-tune the specific details, and then it’s ready to share. From there, creating custom schedules for each vendor and shifting the time for a series of events can also be done with just a click or two.

It is our goal to take the time out of building timelines, and to give your events a perfect, professional schedule to follow. Our seasoned planners are able to handle so many more clients with ease. Our new planners or one-time planners (like couples getting married or parents throwing a quinceñera) are able to quickly build polished timelines like pros.

So what is a timeline? It is the crucial blueprint of any event, without which all would be chaos. It is also notoriously time-consuming. Timeline Genius is here to change that.